Vijay's gallery of animated images & art

#30YearsofGIFs

In the earliest days of the net, GIFs and JPGs for different aspects of this brave new world often made reference to pre-existing technologies and objects. For example, the above GIF shows two letterboxes for email, a virtual reinterpretation of the traditional door flap for letters and parcels. This analogy helped people be more comfortable with the new technology by relating it to things they were already familiar with IRL.

Lovable Pikachu, the yellow star of the anime series Pokémon, first made his appearance in 1996 in a Nintendo Game Boy game and arrived on TV a year later. A generation of people made Pokemon GIFs to put on their sites and really show they caught them all!. Unlike many things from the heyday of GIFs, Pokémon are still going strong, as last year’s Pokémon Go craze can attest.

Your wish is my command!!… This animated GIF, which bears a strong resemblance to the Genie in hit 90s Disney movie Aladdin, was widespread on websites hosted by GeoCities. Sadly my research couldn’t find much of a back story on him.

Different versions of the ‘Under Construction’ GIF, such as the one featured above were popular on the early Net. For home-based website creators especially, these GIFs were a way of showing they were hard at work building their sites, just like at a construction site. Many of the GIFs were based off of US road signage. Sadly, after the demise of Web 1.0 in the first few years of the 21st century, the under construction GIFs that frequented the likes of Geocities went the way of the floppy disk, surviving now in only legacy sites and GIF collections.

During the 90s, drinks brand 7Up had a character called Cool Spot. He appeared on its packaging, in video games, TV ads and of course, like any self-respecting mascot, made it to GIF immortality. According to WIRED magazine, this little red dot may have been the world’s first viral brand GIF. In India, this would have been just a fancy dancing bindi with sunglasses LOL.

This cute little GIF, a US-style letter box that opens to reveal a cluster of hearts, was a popular feature on the user-generated network of sites called GeoCities during the 1990s. It was, as appearance suggests, use to indicate links to emails. Sadly I don’t know its origins.

Our second #30YearsofGIFs post introduces the ‘Dancing Banana’. This little yellow fellow was another Internet GIF pioneer. Appearing in the early 2000s, this fruit derived from a cult Flash video “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” made by Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn (with the song “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” by The Buckwheat Boyz). Just like the Dancing Baby, the banana achieved celebrity status, appearing in a 2005 episode of Family Guy.

The Dancing Banana became so well-known that some forum owners set the word banana to show a dancing banana emoticon GIF.